18 Jun ‘The Colour of Mimmo Jodice’ from the Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro to the catalogue published by Editori Paparo, printed by Tecnostampa, Loreto, Italy

Until 10 January 2027, the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro in Naples is hosting “Il Colore di Mimmo Jodice”, an exhibition paying tribute to the great Neapolitan photographer who passed away in October 2025 at the age of 91, a leading figure in over sixty years of experimentation and visual research.
The exhibition, curated by Sylvain Bellenger and produced by D’Uva in collaboration with Mimmo Jodice Studio, presents to the public a little-known yet extraordinarily significant chapter of his work: the artist’s only major colour photography project, dedicated to the masterpieces of 17th-century Neapolitan painting.

Mimmo Jodice is one of the most influential and poetic figures in contemporary Italian photography.
He was born in Naples in 1934, in the Rione Sanità district, an urban setting steeped in history, contrasts and cultural layers that would leave a profound mark on his imagination. After an initial interest in drawing and painting, he turned to photography as a self-taught artist in the 1950s, soon choosing an independent and exploratory path.
From the 1960s onwards, he embarked on a profoundly innovative exploration, pushing photography beyond its traditional boundaries and transforming it into an autonomous and conscious artistic language. During this phase, he experienced an intense atmosphere of experimentation and engagement with the contemporary avant-garde, entering into dialogue with leading figures on the international scene such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, at a time when art was opening up to the fusion of artistic languages, to experimentation and to the breaking down of established forms.
From the 1970s onwards, his artistic vision became more clearly defined: black and white became his preferred medium, essential and rigorous, and his gaze focused on empty cities, archaeological landscapes, statues and traces of the past, which became fragments of a collective and universal memory.
From 1970 to 1994, he taught photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, training generations of artists and making a decisive contribution to the spread of photographic culture in Italy.

JODICE’S VIEW OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURYRather than photographing the works in their entirety, Jodice isolated fragments of them – details that were often almost invisible: a face, a hand, a glance, a fold in the fabric, a fleeting expression. Through photography, these elements took on a new autonomy and a surprising sense of contemporaneity.
The large canvases by Jusepe de Ribera, Caravaggio, Luca Giordano, Battistello Caracciolo, Filippo Vitale, Francesco Guarini and Artemisia Gentileschi thus became a territory to be explored and reinterpreted. Colour did not serve a descriptive function, but became an analytical and emotional tool, capable of rendering the pictorial material as a living, present-day experience.
As Sylvain Bellenger observes, the dialogue between Jodice’s photographic works and the heritage of the Treasury of San Gennaro brings together two worldviews: the Baroque one, which tends towards a total and immersive representation of reality, and the photographer’s modern one, which proceeds by fragments, isolating the detail and transforming it into a key to understanding the whole.

FROM 1985 TO THE PRESENT DAY: THE RETURN OF A MASTERPIECE
The photographs on display today were first shown in 1985 at Villa Pignatelli in the exhibition *Un Secolo di Furore*, where they were met with considerable public and critical acclaim. Despite their significance, this series remained, for a long time, less well-known than the famous black-and-white images that established Jodice as one of the leading figures in international photography.
For the current exhibition, the slide prints have undergone a major restoration project overseen by Barbara Jodice and Marco Spatuzza, which has also enabled the recovery of several previously unpublished shots. “In these photographic works by my father, I recognise his unique ability to experience light, lending the works an intense and contemporary presence,” emphasises Barbara Jodice.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE TREASURE OF SAN GENNARO